Was it that we got lucky or is it simply that Masai Mara is teeming with lions and lionesses! We enjoyed sightings of them in large prides, in twos, threes, even thirteen! We watched them sleeping, walking about, stretching, giving each other head butts… and even making a live kill (more on that later). Here is to the Big Cats of the great Savanna
We often wonder if it was just a stroke of incredible luck or if the Masai Mara is simply teeming with lions and lionesses at every turn. We were treated to sightings of them in every possible manner—a large pride huddled together, pairs patrolling the tall grass or having an afternoon nap behind a bush and even a group of thirteen young lionesses that seemed to wake up from a longish slumber and favour us as what we call a ‘fashion walk’. We sat, quite transfixed, watching them as they slept through the midday heat, sauntered across the plains with that effortless power or engaged in those endearing, heavy head-butts that remind you they are, after all, just very large cats. We even bore witness to a live kill, though I shall save the gritty details of that for a later post.
This blog is a bit of a tribute to the Big Cats of these great savanna grasslands. We spent hours—absolute hours—capturing their many shifting moods. There is something quite startling about seeing a lion’s wide yawn up close, or that fierce, wrinkled sneer that tells you exactly who is in charge. The manner in which this team of thirteen showed us all their moments of waking up, stretching, head butting, walking and then pausing with a practised boredom expression are what movies are made of. Here is a world where the stakes are always high, yet they carry themselves with a sort of unbothered, royal ease.
My husband’s passion for photography found its true meaning during this trip. It was sheer joy to see the end results of his endless click click clicks! Each frame he captured seemed to tell a fresh story of living, loving and survival in the wild. The golden light of the Mara—that heavy, amber glow that arrives just before the sun dips—provided the most magnificent backdrop for these majestic predators. It wasn’t just a safari; it was a masterclass in nature’s raw, unfiltered beauty.
When you’re sitting in the jeep, you learn patience. You wait and you wait, while your expert guide-cum-driver of the cruiser tells you from sights and sounds, just how close or how far the cats are. Heart thumping just a little faster than usual, you realise that the Mara doesn’t just show you animals; it invites you into a drama that has been playing out forever. The way the light catches the tawny fur of a lioness as she stretches, or the intense, amber focus in a cub’s eyes, is enough to make us feel so tiny in the midst of this vast nothingness. It’s about the silence between the clicks of the shutter, where you can almost hear the heartbeat of the plains.
And you know what? We found that the more time we spent just sitting still, the more the Mara started to whisper its little secrets to us. First learning in the Animal is ‘patience’. Once patient, you begin to pick up on those tiny details that you’d normally miss in a dash; the way a pride leader shifts his weight just a fraction maybe to test the wind, or that quiet, almost military discipline the young ones show as they trail their mothers through the scrub. There is this quite profound sense of order tucked away in what might look like total chaos to an untrained eye. It’s a bit like watching a well-rehearsed play where everyone knows their role perfectly well, even if we’re just catching a glimpse from the wings. My husband’s camera became a sort of bridge between us and that wild world, freezing moments of tension and tenderness that would otherwise have vanished into the wilderness.
As we look back through the hundreds of photos, it’s the sense of presence that sticks. That feeling of being a guest in a golden kingdom where the “Bedouin mind” can finally stop searching and just…observe. It’s a humbling reminder that while we have our schedules and our routines, the lions have the sun and the seasons. They don’t hurry, yet everything happens in its own time. It’s a lesson in patience that I think we’ll be carrying with us for quite some time. Until the next golden hour calls us back, we’ll be reliving these stories, one frame at a time.